Dive Brief:
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Capital One Financial Corp. is embracing technology as it seeks to gain an edge on its competitors in the financial sector. "Technology is reshaping this business," Rob Alexander, CIO of Capital One Financial Corp. told The Wall Street Journal. "The winners will integrate banking into customers’ lives."
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Capital One has been steadily moving to the cloud, using Amazon Web Services, Agile development and open source technology. "Our industry is undergoing dramatic change that is enabled by technology and also required by customer expectations and behaviors,” said Alexander.
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The company’s latest tech endeavor involves integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice-processing service to allow customers to conduct a variety of banking activities.
Dive Insight:
Alexander credited Capital One’s CEO Richard Fairbank for recognizing long ago that technology is critical in banking.
The financial services sector has proven slow in the adoption of more agile cloud technology, particularly because of concerns about security and regulatory compliance. They are also mired in legacy technology, relying in many cases on mainframes that are decades old.
But now, large banks are looking to adopt public cloud services, which is what made it CIO Dive's 2016 transformation of the year. Researchers from Deutsche Bank found bank IT executives could increase their use of IaaS 30% by 2019.
